Hundreds held in global abuse investigation

More than 120 suspected paedophiles have been arrested in Britain as part of one of the biggest global investigations ever mounted into child abuse networks on the internet, police said today.

Across the world 670 paedophile suspects have been identified and a total of 184 arrests made – two thirds in the UK – as part of Operation Rescue, which has been running for more than three years.

The latest arrest was yesterday in Northamptonshire, it was revealed at a press conference in The Hague, headquarters of Europol, which co-ordinated a police crackdown involving forces in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, America and the UK.

The massive inquiry was headed by the UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP).

CEOP's boss, UK police chief Peter Davies, was at today's news conference to announce that 230 children had been identified as victims of child abuse and rescued as a result of ``very serious crimes on a truly global basis''.

Mr Davies said: “The scale and success of Operation Rescue has broken new ground.

“Not only is it one of the largest operations of its kind to date, and the biggest we have led, it also demonstrates the impact of international law enforcement agencies working together with one single objective – to safeguard children and bring offenders to justice.

“The paedophile suspects belonged to an online forum – boylover.net – operated from a server based in the Netherlands. The website, which has now been shut down, had 70,000 members and attempted to run a ’discussion-only’ exchange to share members’ sexual interests in young boys without committing specific offences.

“But some members used the contacts established on the site to set up more private links with other members to exchange and share illegal images and films of child abuse.

“What we have shown today is that while these offenders felt anonymous in some way because they were using the internet to communicate, the technology was actually being used against them.

“Everything they did online, everyone they talked to or anything they shared could be, and was, tracked by following the digital footprint.”

CEOP senior investigating officer Kelvin Lay said most of the hundreds of users of the site who had already been investigated as child abuse suspects were likely to be arrested: ``The latest arrest was in Northamptonshire yesterday, and some other people can expect a knock on the door at any time.''

The original website which triggered Operation Rescue attracted all sorts of people, Europol director Rob Wainwright said.

There were school teachers, taxi drivers, IT consultants – a cross section of professional workers drawn together by boylover.net.

Mr Lay said some were scout masters and one, already charged with child abuse offences, was a karate instructor.

Mr Wainwright said the results of the three-year crackdown were ``phenomenal'' and praised analysts at Europol's headquarters for infiltrating the sophisticated computer codes designed to cover the traces of those using the online forum to meet up or exchange illegal images of children.

He said Europol had so far issued more than 4,000 intelligence reports to police authorities in more than 30 countries which had led to the arrest of suspects and the identification of abused children.

“I am proud of the exceptional work of our experts in helping police authorities around the world to record these ground-breaking results. The safeguarding of so many vulnerable children is particularly rewarding.”

At the start of the investigation in 2007, British and Australian covert police internet teams infiltrated the boylover.net site to try to identify those members assessed as posing the highest risk to children.

Mr Lay said: “In very many cases, the members of this website had signed on using their real identities and job descriptions and we made our priority the monitoring of those whose jobs were most likely to bring them into contact with children.”

The website’s superficial purpose did not involve illegality but police were keen to track the movement of potential child abuse offenders from boylover.net to other sites where images of child abuse may be exchanged and illegal contacts made.

It was CEOP which located the owner of the website in 2009 and traced the server to the Netherlands, at which point Europol joined the inquiry.

Thirty-three of the 121 offenders arrested in the UK have been convicted, police said.

As part of the operation, CEOP provided intelligence to the Royal Thai Police in February 2008 about British nationals who were suspected of committing child sexual abuse in their jurisdiction.

This led ultimately to Operation Naga in November 2008, during which four suspects were arrested, a CEOP spokeswoman said.

The ages of those suspects arrested in the UK ranged from 17 and 82, she added.

Dutchman Amir Ish-Hurwitz, 37, who set up and owned the website, was jailed by a Dutch court yesterday - triggering the decision to publicise the scale of the police operation.

“We could have publicised this earlier, or later, but once the website owner was in court it was obvious that information would emerge,” said a Dutch police spokesman.

Meanwhile, Mr Davies confirmed that one of the suspects arrested in Britain so far is a woman.

He said: “I think one of the key messages from this operation is that the internet is not a safe haven for criminals.

“It is not a free place to operate criminally. My advice to young people is to think carefully when they go on the internet because they don’t necessarily know who they are speaking to – and nor did some of these offenders, who found they were actually making contact with members of our international police team.”

No one was prepared to comment today on the possible number of Britons who may yet face arrest in connection with Operation Rescue, but Mr Lay revealed that all of Britain’s 43 police forces had been involved in arresting at least one suspect directly linked to the operation.